Ajackus

Please describe your company and your position there.

STB is the world’s most comprehensive B2B solution for traveler health and safety measures and traveler experience initiatives announced by suppliers which influences traveler decisions in the new normal. As the COO, my mandate is to oversee the operations of the company.

For what projects/services did your company hire Ajackus?

We needed tech support to build the data platform that could host our curated data and provide seamless API feed to travel suppliers and intermediaries.

What were your goals for this project?

The goal was to provide accurate and real-time information to travelers in the new normal so as to ensure stress-free travel planning and a safer travel experience.

How did you select Ajackus?

We and Ajackus had our offices at the same co-working space and had known Maulik Begali for few years, so the discovery was relatively easier. We explored a couple more tech providers before on-boarding Ajackus.

Describe the project in detail.

The first few weeks were invested in discovery meetings to better understand and align our goals and objectives. The team came up with a database design, which was implemented to facilitate quick migration from excel files. An intuitive backend was provided to the content and QA team to access, update and check the content. The GraphQL API enabled the customized piping of this content to travel partners.

What was the team composition?

We had project managers working on either side, which facilitated effective communication between the tech team - designers, developers, and testers - and the content team.

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

A state-of-the-art, customizable API that could be plugged into any existing tech platforms of any travel suppliers/intermediary. Besides the API, the Ajackus team built an intelligence engine to power the benchmarking tool that assessed various travel suppliers such as airlines, airports, and car rental/ride-hailing services on the initiatives taken by them around COVID-19 health and safety protocols.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

The project managers had daily sync-ups over the phone and Microsoft teams platforms.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

The flexibility shown by the team to accommodate change requests.

Are there any areas for improvement?

We believe the output was timely and of good quality. 

Safe Travel Barometer is a travel technology company. I’m its co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer, overseeing product development and its potential implementation with our partners.

We wanted a partner who could not only understand the basic principles of our vision, but also execute rapidly upon scale. Within months, Safe Travel Barometer grew from a content aggregation platform to having an API to dispense this information to clients and partners. The platform is exhaustive, supports hierarchy and depth across more than 2,000 suppliers, 100+ initiatives, and 150+ countries. Moreover, the constant evolution of the travel industry required us to be agile in evolving - and shifting direction of - our product. Ajackus was every thing we could have asked for!

How did you select Ajackus and what were the deciding factors?

Ajackus had a validated track record, and we knew of them via common references.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

Upon getting to know them intimately and discussing our project - Ajackus understood the industry nuances and initiated a game plan for a solution.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

Ajackus' team was led by its founder. The anchor to our progress has been daily stand-ups between core representatives from both sides. This enabled us to communicate, discuss specifics and collaborate to execute efficiently.

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

We pretty much had a milestone every week or two. Be it the backend infrastructure, database schema, GraphQL API enablement, dashboard visualization.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timelines.

As mentioned above, the daily stand-ups with core representatives from both sides, coupled with tools such as messaging, Trello, enabled us to create transparency and made us aware of milestones.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Ajackus' existing understanding of the travel industry coupled with its strength in scaling technology teams as required, is its strong suit.

Please describe your company and your position there.

Buildly is a cloud native Software Architecture as a Service company, we focus on building new native apps and migrating legacy apps to our fast build and learn platform. I am CEO and co-founder of Buildly.

For what projects/services did your company hire Ajackus, and what were your goals?

We hired Ajackus to supplement our existing team and help us scale 2 existing and 1 new project for US based customers.

How did you select Ajackus and what were the deciding factors?

We found Ajackus through internal networks, we found the team to be extremely professional in our initial conversations and well versed in the technologies we were using and planned to implement. They also had a very cheerful attitude about the work and working as a team as well as a refreshing and efficient approach to communication and team coordination.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

Yeah I'm not going to do that, other then to say that the projects we built our based on open source technologies and can be found in GitHub under the buildlyio organization. If you looking to hire a team that understand process, open source, efficiencies in software development and has an almost unending bench of talent, then you should hire Ajackus.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

4 software developers and 1 manager.

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

Again, just hire then you will be glad you did. Overall they have a diverse set of skills and processes to fit almost any development needs i can imagine.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timelines.

We dictated most of the styles of communication once the project started and they were familiar with all of them.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

The diverse team, the skills sets that seems to stretch beyond anything I could need and the attitude across the board was enthusiasm and cooperation.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

I would have hired then sooner and not hired the original agency I went with for the first project.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the COO of WAI - a provider of cognition enhancement solutions and behavioral assessment software to companies and consultants across India, Australia, and the US.

For what projects/services did your company hire Ajackus, and what were your goals?

We hired Ajackus for a customized web app development. The goal was to build a system that helps us on-board entities, build a way to automate pattern detection in the images for the purpose of personality assessment, and have a dashboard to get an insight on the day to day operations.

How did you select Ajackus and what were the deciding factors?

Ajackus was referred to us by a friend about a year before we started working on the project together. We had spoken to multiple freelancers and companies before choosing to go ahead with our product development with Ajackus.

The major deciding factors to proceed with Ajackus were technical knowledge, attitude to find the best fit solution, project management processes, and cost-effectiveness.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

Scope of work:

• Develop a proprietary algorithm that identifies the type of thumbprint through comparison and machine learning
• Prepare a report and send it to the partner entity while capturing user consent online
• Store the data on the cloud through secured measures
• Develop a way to capture the thumbprint of the end-user
• Develop a customized dashboard for Admins and Partners to provide a snippet of the information
• Provide online payment options to the entities to collect payments Project steps
• Requirement gathering and preparation of a PRD
• Planning phase that also included suggestions, and recommendations - Estimates on the timeline
• Development and QA
• Feedback and fixes

Key deliverables:

• A web app with multiple roles
• Personalized subdomain for partner entities
• Proprietary algorithm to identify the patterns through images
• A secured system to capture the data
• Robust architecture for future enhancements

Technologies used:

• ReactJS for Frontend
• Python for Backend
• PostgreSQL for Database
• AWS for Hosting and Storage

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

We were assigned 3 dedicated developers and a QA for the project. However, 2 members from the leadership were constantly supporting and monitoring the progress.

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

The successful completion of the project has helped us save nearly 40% of our time which was earlier spent on manual processes. Automation has made our system widely scalable. We can track our entire system and its progress under a single dashboard.

Our system has become simple and easy to adapt to our customers. The base for the future enhancement is created and was covered while designing the architecture, this has made it easy for us to have quick checks on new features.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timelines.

The project management was strategic and inclusive. There was tight communication maintained throughout with weekly updates via email and hangout calls. We were also introduced to tools like Trello and Airtable that helped us stay aligned and effectively track progress.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

The support, guidance, work ethic, and genuine intent to help differentiate them from all the other companies that we have come across. I can confidently say that we are not just dealing with a company here but, a group of people that equally care about the success of their client's business. We are proceeding with Ajackus for all the next phases in our technical roadmap.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

Apart from the success of our project, we have personally and professionally learned a lot from the entire team. They are on the right track!

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the founder and CEO of a company creating MatchMe, which is the first truly social dating application.

What challenge were you trying to address with Ajackus?

They are our strategic engineering partners for the project. 

What was the scope of their involvement?

The work that they focused on essentially consisted of a complete refactor of our codebase. That included migrating from native iOS to React JavaScript. We have a professional designer creating the UI/UX of the application and they have translated

What is the team composition?

We started out partnering with just the three founders, and pretty quickly we were able to scale the team to include two core developers, a project lead, and a business strategist who operated as our project manager. From there we were able to add as many as four more developers for specific needs, especially leading up to our go to market.

How did you come to work with Ajackus?

They were referred to us by a contractor who had worked with us on the UI/UX of the application based on his work with them in the past. The way that they approached the relationship and agile project management methodology really sold us on working with them.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent a total of about $50,000 with them.

What is the status of this engagement?

I believe the partnership started around January 2018 and is still ongoing.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

When we started, we had an exclusively native iOS app, and they helped us to transition to a platform-neutral positioning because they understood that the app needed to be usable for users across devices. Ultimately, that decision saved us significantly more money and time down the road.

That is just one example of the kind of strategic engineering advice that I can rely on them for. We are still struggling a little bit to find our product-market fit, but that’s by no means for lack of any effort on their end. They have been involved in our beta testing both locally in India and around the world and have about 700 monthly active users.

We have plans, as well as data points and user feedback to help guide another round of redesign on the UI/UX to help make the whole process a little bit more streamlined so that our users can actually derive the value from the app that is intended.

How did Ajackus perform from a project management standpoint?

Their team is excellent at communication and managing our progress on the project as a whole. We had weekly standups and scrum meetings when necessary, and are able to talk to them about anything that comes up whenever we need because of their consistent availability.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I’ve worked with a number of different developers over the years and they are quite literally the best outsourced engineering firm I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. From the very beginning of our partnership, there was a sense of not only quality engineering advice and services, but a real strategic nature to their approach.

They understood that we are a bootstrapped startup and really made every effort to partner with me to make the relationship as cost-effective as possible as well as to make better product decisions based on what some of our legacy technology decisions had been. On top of that, they just fundamentally believe in the app and want us to succeed in a way that most partners do not.

Are there any areas they could improve?

There really is nothing that I can think of that they could be doing differently.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Working with any of the three co-founders on your project is going to be really helpful in establishing the relationship and helping to establish your strategy for your roadmap ahead.